Diamond Dorp News Today : Breaking News, Live Updates & Top Stories | Vimarsana

There was nothing more delightful in my mom’s kitchen or on my dad’s braai than a succulent lobster plucked from the wild sea that morning.

Food triggers memories and takes us back to a moment in time long forgotten. Suddenly, when you bite into something you haven’t eaten for years, there you are, in your school uniform, buying a pack of smoked snoek at the Pick n Pay at the Adelphi Centre in Sea Point. As if it were yesterday. I’d eat every last morsel of it, even while still walking home along the suburb’s Main Road, pulling the smoky flesh away from the long, firm bones; to me, smoked snoek is the quintessential taste of Cape Town, much more so than a Gatsby with all its chips and the whole world inside it.

Christmas seems to know no creed any more; over time it’s become a thing for everybody. It punctuates our years and our lives whether we are Christians, Rastafarians or mere hopeless sinners who spend hours shopping in the days and weeks leading up to the day. It’s become inescapably secular in ways other than the brash vulgarity of its colours and sounds. But enough of shopping malls and Boney M. The Big Day can be as joyous as it can be deathly depressing. How much more so the Christmas at the end of a year in which almost every family is touched by sickness or death from a disease that...